It is my pleasure to announce that Professor David Forsyth will serve as the next Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. David is well known within the computer vision community for the depth and breadth of his research contributions and interests. He has also served in a large number of leadership roles, including organizing the main vision conferences several times, coauthoring a widely used textbook, and running important committees. He has been an associate editor of TPAMI, and has been deeply involved in various discussions about the relationship between the computer vision community and the IEEE Computer Society. I have great confidence that David will uphold the high standards of the journal, and under his leadership it will continue to serve the community admirably.

Please join me in congratulating David on his appointment, and in thanking him in advance for the tremendous amount of time and energy he will devote to the journal throughout his term. His abbreviated biography appears below.

David joins TPAMI when it is in good health, having withstood a number of invigorating challenges over the past few years involving open access, machine learning, and coordination with the main computer vision conferences. In terms of open access, while recent moves by the IEEE Computer Society are a substantial step in the right direction, a large gap remains between what TPAMI offers to authors and what, for example, is available from the leading machine learning journal JMLR. On the topic of machine learning papers in TPAMI, we now have two AEICs in this area who are substantially raising the journal’s standards in this area. Finally, the coordination with the leading conferences has improved significantly, with David Forsyth played a significant role in his capacity as a CVPR11 program chair.

When I look back at my four years as EIC, I am on the whole happy with the progress that the journal has made. However, I do not want to minimize the challenges that David will face, especially now that the main vision conferences will no longer be solely sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. In the long term, a separation of the journal and the conferences is not sustainable since they are different aspects of the same community, but this will need to play out in a manner that maintains the high publication standards that are a point of pride for all of us.

It is impossible to perform the task of EIC without help from numerous others (and in fact, even with their help it is often only barely manageable!). I would like to take this traditional opportunity to thank the many people who put so much time and effort into this enterprise. The foundations of the entire edifice, of course, are the authors and reviewers who submit their best work and who careful criticize and evaluate submissions. While we have an obvious way to reward authors, the reviewers are in many respects the unsung heroes, and I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the enormous debt that we owe to all of them. I also am grateful for the tireless work that the Associate Editors who served during my term put into the journal; their careful oversight is invaluable, and the high quality of the papers that TPAMI continues to publish is a testament to their dedication to an often thankless task. The professional staff at the Computer Society has also put in a great deal of high quality effort, which is by its nature invisible to everyone except the EIC, and I want to publicly thank Hilda Carman, Kathy Santa Maria, Kathleen Henry, and Alicia Stickley for their patience with me. The day to day management of the flood of journal submissions was initially handled by Elaine Stephenson, then by Andy Morton and now by Tara Delaney, all of whom performed with grace under pressure.

One of the pleasures of the EIC position is the remarkable willingness of senior members of the community to step up to help the journal when asked. I wish to thank the members of the TPAMI advisory board, Chris Bishop, Andrew Blake, David Fleet, Zoubin Gharamani, Eric Grimson, Dan Huttenlocher, Daphne Koller, David Kriegman, Jitendra Malik, and Gerard Medioni. The advisory board has been an extremely helpful source of feedback about a wide range of issues, including Associate Editor and AEIC appointments. I especially want to single out David Fleet, Zoubin Gharamani, and Daphne Koller for the time and effort they put in to finding new AEICs in machine learning.

I have been extremely fortunate to have the support of an outstanding group of Associate Editors in Chief, beginning with Zoubin Gharamani and Jiri Matas. Zoubin, who started his term with my predecessor David Kriegman, began TPAMI’s shift in earnest towards the machine learning community. Jiri was my first appointment when I took over TPAMI, and no doubt one of the best decisions I have made; his combination of rigor and breadth has been invaluable. TPAMI was enormously strengthened when Max Welling joined, and it is a mark of the esteem in which Max is held that he quickly persuaded Neil Lawrence to come on board as well. Max and Neil have done a phenomenal job of raising our standards and reputation in the crucial area of machine learning, and I eagerly anticipate the high quality special issues they have organized. Last but not least, Sing Bing Kang completed my AEIC team, and has fully lived up to my very high expectations (it is almost unheard of for Sing Bing to take more than 12 hours to complete a task after I ask him, no matter how complex).

I owe a special thank you to Gerard Medioni, with whom I have had the pleasure of working intensively since 2006. Gerard somehow manages to combine excellent taste and judgment on controversial issues with remarkable selflessness. While he did not manage to dissuade me from applying for the EIC position, he gets credit for warning me about the IEEE obstacles that I would face. I also want to acknowledge Angela Burgess and Sorel Reisman, who have done their very best to help TPAMI and the community it represents negotiate these challenges.

Finally, I’d like to thank my wife Melanie and our daughter Annabella—whose birth during my first year as EIC made it a particularly memorable time—for their patience and forbearance for permitting me to give the journal the time and attention it demanded. It has been an honor to serve as EIC during these interesting times, and I look forward to watching David Forsyth lead this remarkable journal in new and exciting directions.

Ramin Zabih

Editor in Chief

David Forsyth holds the BSc and MSc degrees in electrical engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the DPhil degree in engineering science from Oxford University.�He held a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, then became an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Iowa.�He was on the faculty in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley for 10 years. He is currently professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is lead author of Computer Vision: A Modern Approach, a computer vision textbook now in its second edition. He was coauthor of a paper awarded the Marr Prize in 1993; coauthor of a paper awarded�Best Paper in Cognitive Computer Vision in 2002; and received an IEEE Technical Achievement award in 2005. He became an IEEE Fellow in 2009. He regularly serves on the program committee of various�conferences in computer vision and computer graphics. He has served as: program cochair for CVPR; program cochair for ECCV; �general cochair for CVPR; �Associate Editor for PAMI; AE for the IEEE Transactions� on Multimedia; AE for the International Journal on Computer Vision; AE for the ACM Transactions on Graphics; and AE for the Journal� of the ACM. He has written papers on most topics in computer vision, and some topics in computer graphics, many of which have been published.

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